Portrait

Jim Kolbe

Born: 28 June 1942Evanston, Illinois, USA
Died: 3 December 2022aged 80

PoliticianUnited States

Jim Kolbe

A moderate Republican congressman from Arizona, he came out in 1996 – and was re-elected five more times.

Jim Kolbe was born in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up on a ranch in rural Arizona. As a teenager he served for three years as a page in the US Senate for Barry Goldwater. He studied political science at Northwestern University and business at Stanford, served in the US Navy in Vietnam with the riverine “Swift Boat” force, and became a business executive in Tucson.

In 1976 he was elected to the Arizona Senate, and in 1984 to the US House of Representatives, where he represented southern Arizona for 22 years. Kolbe was a moderate Republican in the tradition of Goldwater: he supported abortion rights, was more open to environmental protection than most of his party and championed free trade and guest-worker programmes for immigrants.

In 1996 he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevented federal recognition of same-sex marriages. Shortly afterwards, as a gay activist group prepared to out him, he came out publicly as gay. He was re-elected five more times, becoming the second openly gay Republican elected to Congress. In 2004 and 2006 he voted against a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In 2000 he spoke at the Republican National Convention.

After leaving Congress in 2007 he advised on trade policy under President Barack Obama. In 2013 he married his partner. After the election of Donald Trump, he left the Republican Party in 2018. Kolbe died in 2022, aged 80.

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